RECORDINGS VIEW

RECORDINGS VIEW; The Cure Finds A Hint of Cheer Amid the Gloom

By JON PARELES

Published: April 19, 1992

Longtime cure fans should brace themselves for what happens midway through the band's new album, "Wish": There are two cheerful songs in a row. Over folky guitar strumming, "Doing the Unstuck" advises "Kick out the gloom" and "Let's get happy!" Next, "Friday I'm in Love" uses the major chords and jingle-jangle guitars of British Invasion folk-pop to praise "the wonderful surprise/ To see your shoes and your spirits rise."

It doesn't last. In other songs on "Wish," the English rockers' ninth album of new material, the singer drinks himself into a self-hating stupor at a party, agonizes over a former girlfriend, pushes away those who would offer comfort, sees the inevitability of a breakup and realizes that his only love doesn't trust him. Even "Friday I'm in Love" makes the other days of the week less than lighthearted: "I don't care if Monday's black/ Tuesday Wednesday heart attack." But Robert Smith, the Cure's singer and lyricist, hasn't allowed his melancholy to lift for two consecutive songs since the band coalesced in 1978.

The packaging for "Wish" (Elektra 61309; cassette and CD) includes an epigraph from Shelley that concludes, "Our sweetest songs are those that tell/ Of saddest thought," and for more than a decade the Cure has told of sad thoughts almost exclusively. Tormented love shades into unspeakable loneliness; devastated hopes lead to thoughts of murder or intimations of death. As the band's music has veered from punk concision to dance-rock to somber ballads, the lyrics have rarely wavered from the essence of mope-rock.

Smith sings in a hurt, desperate voice, one that bays and then breaks as he keeps finding new ways to tear himself apart. Although his singing immediately separates fans from skeptics, Smith has managed to avoid self-parody, perhaps because he has been so extreme from the beginning.

The Cure's songs offer the flip side of the widely promoted image of adolescence: all youthful exuberance and well-bonded groups and a promising future and perfect skin. The Cure speaks to people left out of that fantasy, to adolescents and post-adolescents who feel isolated and unloved, who won't or can't fit in. If such people are a minority, they're a sizable one: the Cure's recent albums have sold in the millions, and on the band's last tour, in 1989, the Cure filled Giants Stadium.

"Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me," released in 1987, offered some stripped-down rockers, and the 1990 collection of remixes, "Mixed Up," emphasized the beat, suitable for dance disk jockeys. Although it hasn't disdained public gatherings like concerts and clubs, the Cure knows that its music is usually heard in private. "Disintegration," released in 1989, and "Wish" are both made for the most solitary listening: through earphones.

Portable stereos have made earphones part of most listeners' routine. Yet surprisingly few performers have chosen the kind of sonic subtleties that reigned during headphones' last heyday, the psychedelic late 1960's and early 1970's, when musicians from the Steve Miller Band to Pink Floyd stretched out songs and tucked unlikely sounds into the background for hyperattentive fans. ("Apart," on "Wish," is a pure Pink Floyd homage.)

Many current bands try to jolt and tickle sound-bite-size attention spans or to pound home a knock-'em-dead riff. Simultaneously, digital clarity has led to a backlash of guitar murk and general noise. But the Cure has found its own kind of excess: making every song a sea of riffs. Not one bassline, but two, three; not one guitar hook, but layers of harmony and countermelody, and a vocal line that follows none of them. The riffs don't mesh and then repeat; instead, they drift and contend, surge and collapse.

With "Disintegration" and now with "Wish," the Cure has returned to the dirgelike tempos it used in the early 1980's. Now, however, the songs have thickened, as the band has added keyboards and allowed itself to pile on studio overdubs, with sounds floating across the stereo field. On "Disintegration," keyboards and basses clouded the atmosphere; "Wish" turns up the guitars, using them to pick out lines and to fill arrangements with woozy disorientation.

The melody lines and arrangements often paraphrase older Cure songs. "Cut" derives its frantic wah-wah guitars from "The Kiss" on "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me"; the magisterial keyboards of "Trust" recall "Homesick" from "Disintegration"; the march beat and multiple basses of "High" look back to "In Between Days" from "The Head on the Door" (1985). Yet the new songs sound less stable, more distracted, bleary with noise and uncertainty.

It's psychedelia, but turned inside-out. What sounded in the 1960's like an explosion of possibilities is now a dank nightmare, full of looming terrors: a drumbeat that mutates into a phased whoosh, a guitar line that melts into its own reverberation. Singing crisply defined rock, Smith used to present his character's pain and dread as if it were an objective fact; in his more recent songs, that pain has become a private condition, echoing between the ears.

Though he has long sounded like someone at the end of his tether, Smith now seems not only trapped inside his own head, but also impatient with his role as the voice of lonely suffering. "Doing the Unstuck" is one attempt at escape, and so is the album's final song, "End." "Giving up and going on," he sings, "are both the same old song." Eventually, he begs: "Please stop loving me/ I am none of these things." But after all this time, what else can he be? Happy?

Photo: Robert Smith of the Cure -- The new album is made for the most solitary kind of listening, through earphones. (Jay Blakesberg/Retna)